Resilience is hot property in modern society. To the Olympian, it's the difference between gold and everything else; to the startup founder it's the line between a billion dollar company or utter failure; and to your old uncle at the family barbecue, it's the thing that's entirely absent from younger 'snowflake' generations who don't know what it was like to live through the blitz (spoiler - he doesn't either). To many of us, it's the thing we think we need more of to survive the many challenges going on in the world.
But it’s one thing to acknowledge the value of resilience and quite another to cultivate it; and if the statistics around issues such as mental health and burnout are anything to go by, we’re not doing such a good job on that front.
I for one, do not ascribe to the view that we’ve somehow just bred resilience out of the gene pool; or that in de-stigmatising mental health we’ve made a lack of resilience ‘fashionable’. In fact I think we’re looking at resilience all wrong - as an individual trait, rather than thinking about creating the environment in which resilience can flourish. We should be thinking more systemically about resilience.
Don’t get me wrong, there are things for each of us to do to help strengthen our own resilience. There is plenty of evidence around the role that diet, exercise, sleep, social connection, relaxation and time in nature can play in our overall mental health and therefore resilience. In a work setting, you can add examples like better managing our time, delegating effectively and setting healthy boundaries, to name just a few. But I’d argue that looking at resilience solely as the responsibility of the individual is covering up the underlying issue - why are things so damn hard to begin with?
One of my favourite books of all time - Factfulness, by Hans Rosling - does a phenomenal job of painting a picture of the world’s development through data. Something that’s hard to deny in reading that book is that most of us in the world are better off now than anyone in human history by a whole load of measures - we live longer, have higher literacy, are less vulnerable to disease, have lower infant mortality, and are living in the most peaceful period in human history. Yet I don’t think it feels that way to most of us. By most measures we’re getting better off and yet we feel worse in the process.
It’s a confusing gap for which there is no simple answer; however I do see three important factors that I believe play a part in the story of resilience here:
There are those who would argue that issues like the climate crisis; or the destruction of certain jobs by AI, are entirely unprecedented in terms of their existential threat to humanity. There are also those who would argue that human history has been littered with existential threats, or at least things that felt like an existential threat at the time, and that these are nothing new.
What we can be sure of is that we are more connected now to the problems going on in the world than ever before. Most people, for most of human history, have been connected to a small radius of news and problems within a few miles of where they live vs. our current experience, essentially living on an IV drip of continuous distressing news, much of which might be taking place in far flung places in the world, and it’s overwhelming us.
When I interviewed Jo Marchant, the author of the NY times bestseller, Cure, we spoke at length about the impact of stress exposure on the body. In general we are well equipped to deal with short bursts of stress if we embrace it as a challenge - the physiology of our body responds e.g. blood vessels dilate so your heart can pump blood around the body more efficiently. But, long term exposure to chronic stress is disastrous for our health. Our nervous systems are simply not meant to live in a constant heightened state of fight or flight.
Couple that exposure to continuous stress with an absence of connection and community and it’s like throwing dynamite at a building with one of the key structural supports removed. We live more atomised lives, both in the sense that traditional forms of community such as work, family, religion and local community all seem to be in some state of decline or shift without obvious alternatives; and in the sense that our values (at least in countries like the UK and US) seem to be more aligned with our individual needs vs. the collective.
And yet the evidence around the importance of connection and community is compelling - according to some studies group membership is the biggest predictor of long term wellbeing in the aftermath of a major health event; others suggest that loneliness may pose as big a health threat as smoking - and do we even really need the studies to confirm so much of what we already know to be true and our hardwiring for connection.
In the midst of the exposure to chronic stress, and without the connection and community to help support us, we struggle to find meaning. So much of the human experience is about meaning making. For most of human history meaning was simply about doing the things necessary to be fed, watered, safe and to reproduce. Those things were very hard for most people so left little space for wider contemplation, and things like religion filled that small space.
For the boomer generation, emerging post war, meaning could be found for many in a social contract that promised a comfortable existence in exchange for taking a steady job. There were still existential issues to contend with e.g. the threat of nuclear war; but at least a decent life was affordable to the average person e.g. the average cost of a house was roughly 2-3x average income vs. 8-10 today.
Where we are today combines a backdrop of existential issues, which we’re constantly tuned into, without the same support of community and connection, and with a broken social contract that now puts a comfortable existence beyond the financial means of a greater swathe of society. It’s no wonder people get to the point of thinking - ‘what’s the point?’ - and once the hope’s gone then what’s left?